​‘The customer may not always be right, but they must always win’

If there was a naughty step for customers, more than a handful would sit on it. Shoplifting is at its highest level ever recorded and incidents of violence and abuse against shopworkers are spiralling. They say that we are what we buy, but the customer also has a responsibility for how they buy.

How we buy might have changed irreversibly, but the needs which drive customer behaviour haven’t changed one jot. We might want things a little faster or indeed a little slower, but our need for recognition, transparency, inspiration, empathy and consistency of experience still stands as firm as ever.

Yet despite the staggering investment in technology to join up, speed up or brush up the customer experience, customer satisfaction levels across all sectors have been in steady decline for the past 10 years. The customer no longer feels like a customer.

Contact centres with endless menu options, hopelessly ineffective chatbots, obscure complaint handling processes or disempowered and disengaged frontline teams have all conspired to blight something which was once seen as the greatest business differentiator, where retail always paved the way.

Before you have me lynched, bring to mind your own experience. The last cancelled flight that left you stranded with no means of contacting the airline. The last unexpected additional cost which appeared on an invoice. The last tiresome insurance renewal. The last time you were left waiting for a company that had promised an altogether different experience.

Technology and the endless possibilities of AI and process automation are bringing great things to the industry, but not all technology is equal.

While most customers are very happy to self-serve when things go right, the only test of your customer experience which really matters is how your organisation responds when things go wrong. How seamlessly and effectively do your platforms whisk any disgruntled customers towards a satisfactory outcome? How actively do you listen to your customers’ concerns and how empowered and enabled are your people to resolve anything which falls outside the box?

Customer service (or customer experience, however you prefer to coin it) is surprisingly easy to underestimate. Easy to oversimplify as being nice to people, easy to overlook in the battle for investment. Easy to brag about, yet far more difficult to deliver.

“It might mean saying sorry, even if your customers aren’t always right. You’ll choose to put your customers first, even when there are lots of good reasons why you shouldn’t”

No retailer ever knowingly or deliberately puts the customer second, but there are more than a handful who make brazen claims about customer-centricity while leaving the customer stalling behind other priorities.

Starting with the customer means taking a few steps back from what you’re selling, to what your customer truly wants and expects from you. It means knowing that their complaints lurk in the dark crevices between customer expectation and a customer’s lived experience. It means knowing that what your customer is buying isn’t always the same as what you’re selling.

Starting with the customer means taking stock of their needs and being brutally honest when you fall short, or your competitors are doing a better job.

It might mean saying sorry, even if your customers aren’t always right. You’ll choose to put your customers first, even when there are lots of good reasons why you shouldn’t; and you’ll make sure you listen more intently and step into their shoes as often as you can.

It means ensuring that your team are always your first customers who need to feel complicit in delivering the customer outcomes you want to see. It means knowing that great customer service is cultural and not a set of commandments.

In the broadest terms, there are two types of retail business – those that set their cultural default to ‘yes’ (we’ll try and make that happen for you) and those that focus their service culture in the opposite direction. 

Those who run away from their customers if something ever goes wrong and those who run towards them to learn from their complaints. Those who empower their teams and those who feel safer giving them a rulebook. Those with a leader who cares passionately about customers and those with a leader who pretends to. Those who obsess about understanding the world through the eyes of their customers and those who rely on high-level data and an annual customer round table.

Those who start with the customer and those who don’t.